Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition (PC) Review

Lately, Eastern publishers like Bandai Namco and Sega have been investing more and more in the PC platform. Statistics say that Zesteria and Berseria sold exceptionally well on Steam, further encouraging the publishers.

The Definitive Edition of Tales of Vesperia was recently launched on all three platforms. Although the port came to the PS4 and Xbox One, the fact that it was made available on Steam as well speaks volumes about the changing trends in the industry towards PC Gaming. Epic’s new game store and Microsoft trying their best to make the Windows Store bearable are also further testaments to this shift.

I’ve been playing the Definitive Edition of Tales of Vesperia on PC for a few days now and I’ve got to say, it’s a well-developed port. You can scale the resolution all the way up to 4K, use anti-aliasing techniques like MSAA as well as shader-based FXAA, Anisotropic filtering, LOD, V-Sync (that actually works well) and lastly shadow quality can also be tweaked. Texture resolution isn’t an option for obvious reasons, and the game runs really well without any crashing or freezing.

As for the story and gameplay, it’s the same as the older console version. A 2.5D view in towns and during combat with the field map leveraging full 3D. The story is cheesy like most JRPGs with a silent but good-hearted protagonist and a pure, naive maiden to keep him in line, up against deranged enemies with seemingly sane motives.

The combat is a bit different from the previous Tales’ PC releases. The combat allows four-move combos after which the characters need a moment to re-position. You start off with one arte and gain numerous others through the course of the game. However, the key-bindings are limited to just four (W/S/A/D+RMB). You can assign some to the F1, F2… keys but that’s just plain inconvenient.

Tales of Vesperia returns with all the Tales’ staples like field-banter, item synthesis, skills, an atmospheric soundtrack and the same old anime-styled visuals. Overall, it’s an entertaining experience if you are used to the genre, but gamers who prefer more mature themes like those seen in POI: Deadfire, Dragon Age and most other WRPGs, might find the game too childish or light-hearted at times.

Related

REVIEW OVERVIEW

Story and Setting

Characters

Combat

Soundtrack

Visuals

Remaster Rating

SUMMARY

Tales of Vesperia returns with all the Tales' staples like field-banter, synthesis, skills, an atmospheric soundtrack, and the same old anime-styled visuals. Overall, it's an entertaining experience if you are used to the genre, but gamers used to more mature themes like those seen in POI: Deadfire, Dragon Age and most other WRPGs, might find the game too childish or light-hearted at times.

I love computer hardware and RPGs, and those two things are what drove me to start TechQuila. Other than that most of my time goes into reading psychology, writing (and reading) dark poetry and wondering about the vast undiscovered expanses of our universe.